Superwomen of Eva: CODENAME: XJ9
by The Rei-Fan
Summary: There is a lot to be said for looking before you leap, for learning to crawl before you walk, to walk before you run. Indeed, there is a lot to be said for doing your research before engaging in any high risk venture. Something XJ-9 would soon discover.
1. Enter Titanium Maiden

Superwomen of Evangelion - CODENAME: XJ9

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><p>There is a lot to be said for looking before you leap, for learning to crawl before you walk, to walk before you run. Indeed, there is a lot to be said for doing your research before engaging in <em>any<em> high risk venture.

But on the other hand, you don't always have that luxury, either of time, resources, or information. At the dawn of the twenty-first century mankind was struck by the largest calamity in its short existence, second impact; an event which set in motion an extinction level event not seen since the dinosaurs died out sixty-five million years ago.

In an instant the continent of Antarctica was vaporized and in the following weeks and months hundreds of thousands of species of plant and animal disappeared from the face of the earth along with fully half of the human population of the planet.

It was of course all caused by a case of both not doing the research and pulling the trigger too soon, had the men and women running the experiment at the south pole on that fateful day known what they needed to have known, had they been aware of exactly what it was they were doing, everything could have turned out differently.

History, as it is wont do to, often repeats itself, and in the case of one dark evening in Tokyo-3, another such case of pulling the trigger without doing the research was underway.

x

Shinji sat in his entry plug, sweat rolling off his brow and dissolving into the LCL as quickly as it formed. He reloaded the fuse in the positron rifle and waited as it cooled and recharged. As he waited for the firing solution to finish computing for his second and hopefully final shot, he was completely unaware that the next three minutes would prove to be some of the most important of his life.

"Come on…" he said quietly to himself, urging the computer to process faster, knowing it wouldn't do any good at the same time. The seconds clicked by, the gun was still cooling, computer still calculating. His view screen flashed and then quickly polarized, before him an orange Evangelion was holding a shield, blocking the deadly beam of light, protecting him at the expense of itself.

'_Ayanami!'_ a single thought in his head. His targeting reticule turned green and he pulled the switch. In an instant there was silence, and but a moment later a lance of light and sound issued forth as if Susanoo himself saw fit to lend his strength to the boy.

The beam struck a hexagonal force field for almost a tenth of a second before tearing through it in a magnificent flash like it was so much tissue paper. The beast on the receiving end of the attack shrieked for a moment before it was silenced forever, it's still floating corpse slowly tilting and falling towards the earth.

Before the dust could settle, and in fact before the kill had even been confirmed, Shinji was mobile and within moments was extracting his fellow pilot from her damaged Evangelion, the intense heat coming from it burning even the hands of his own Eva.

It was as he grabbed onto the butterfly handles sealing the escape hatch on his fellow pilot's plug that the more lasting consequences of his final attack on their mutual foe were set in motion. What he didn't know, what he _couldn't_ have known, was that the forces involved in the miracle he'd just performed had consequences far beyond the simple destruction of the Angel. Consequences soon to make themselves known, even if not to him.

x

As a flash like a bolt of lightning temporarily turned night to day a teal and white object streaked through the sky at an alarming speed, easily breaking the sound barrier. Had this happened on any other night it's likely many citizens of Tokyo-3 would have heard, if not seen, the figure as it crashed into and through the still warm remains of what was once the fifth Angel.

It was perhaps this very fact that was her saving grace, the corpse of the monster was certainly more forgiving than the dozens of meters of steel and concrete forming the upper plating of the geofront below, if only marginally.

Metallic eyelids opened, their surface covered in dust and scratches, the rest of her body was in a similar state. A groan escaped her blue lips, "Uh… Did anybody get the license plate on that truck?" she asked aloud to nobody in particular, part of her wishing that she hadn't had her recent nerve upgrade.

Her answer was an abrupt deluge of blood pouring down from the hole she'd just bored through the corpse above her. _'That settles it; I've definitely had better days'_ she thought to herself as she stood back up, letting the viscous red fluid flow off of her, or more accurately, lifted herself out of the pool of blood that had formed over her.

"What is this stuff?" she wondered as she held an arm in front of her, red droplets forming and falling into the larger pool of red she was nearly knee deep in. With but a thought the tip of her left index finger folded back and a sensor probe extended, after dipping it into the pool around her she knew what she was standing in.

Surely she would have vomited at that moment, were she capable of such a thing, as it was she shuddered involuntarily and jumped out of the pool, her metallic pigtails quickly reconfiguring themselves to their flight configuration.

Hovering over the pool she finally took the opportunity to look around, finally gathering her senses she scanned the area, noticing first and foremost the partially destroyed octahedron that somehow was alive, or had been. She'd never seen anything like it, and she'd seen quite a number of strange things in her time as a defender of earth.

The second thing she noticed was that her short term memory was missing; she couldn't remember how she'd gotten there, or, according to her internal clock, anything from the last twelve hours. "Something must have erased my short term memory buffer…" she observed with some alarm while continuing to run her scans of the area. The idea that something could have wiped her memory like that worried her, but at the moment she had more important things to consider.

_'Like how I got to Japan…'_ she thought as her internal systems finally linked up with the GPS satellites in orbit. They were using a protocol that hadn't been used extensively since the early twenty-first century, the more advanced satellites were not responding to her signals, she chalked that up to damage she sustained either on impact or by whatever had wiped her memory.

At the same time she couldn't seem to raise anybody on her internal communicator, something that should have continued working even under _extreme_ personal damage.

"Maybe mom can clear this up for me." She said as she flew away from the intensely creepy corpse dominating the greater part of six city blocks below her. In her mildly damaged state she didn't dare accelerate to the speeds she normally would have, and so it would be another twelve hours before she learned that the home she was trying to return to wouldn't be there when she arrived.

X

A photograph, low resolution but not out of focus, black and white. That was what Commander Ikari Gendo of Nerv held in his hands. It was sobering to think that such a cosmically insignificant thing such as a slip of paper with a printout on it could mean so much, and yet there it was.

"Where did it come from?" he asked his Sub Commander, one Fuyutski Kozo as he handed the picture back to the graying old man who'd given it to him in the first place.

"We don't know, at least not yet. Everything was a mess after the battle; it's as if she appeared out of thin air as far as we can tell. The single eyewitness account we have has her speaking English right before she left, headed east." The older man reported, essentially regurgitating what he himself had been told by the Section Two agent not fifteen minutes prior.

"So, the Americans have sent a one of those armors to keep tabs on us?" Gendo mused as he leaned back in his chair, "It's not as if we don't have enough costumed heroes making things difficult for us."

"Possible I suppose, but it doesn't really seem their style." The Sub Commander replied as he stared at the photo, "The design doesn't look military at all, least of all her state of dress." He noted with a hint of something that bordered between amusement and mild disgust. Who'd ever heard of a power armor wearing a skirt? Or for that matter an armor of such obviously advanced technology, the aforementioned costumed heroes currently plaguing them were good, granted, but not _that_ good. "If anything, it looks like…" he trailed off, dismissing his thought outright due to the pure absurdity of it.

"Fuyutski?" The younger dark haired man prompted.

"Well, if I didn't know any better, I'd say she looks like a teenager."

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><p>I had to do it, and you know you love it.<p>

Please review.


	2. Collision Course

CODENAME: XJ-9 Chapter 2

Wrote this one in some kind of marathon, it's hard to get the beginning of the story out of the way so i can get to the meat of it, but hopefully this chapter doesn't suck.

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><p>"Nobody could have survived that kind of impact…" she said softly to herself after she watched the scene unfold before her, watched the armored figure crash through the Angel at speeds that would have put her own suit to shame.<p>

To say nothing of her tremendous shock when the figure, no, girl as it seemed now that she had a clearer look _'Weird as it may be that somebody would actually put a skirt on their armor' _she thought, stood up and then started flying.

She didn't have a hard time believing the armor would have survived such an impact, her own could have done marginally as well, but anybody inside such a suit should have been turned into a thin watery paste after a hit like that.

Even if they survived, they shouldn't have been moving around so easily, so smoothly. She didn't even look hurt aside the scuffs on her armor, nothing a good buffing wouldn't fix. And surely, she noted, they wouldn't have taken off like a rocket out of Tokyo-3 airspace as she had just done in front of her.

Something didn't add up, she'd decided, "Sid, can you analyze the scans we took of her before she flew off? Something about this is bothering me, whoever is in there is either very, _very _small or that armor plating is skin tight, to say nothing about the fact that an impact like that would have killed _me_."

"I've got nothing, the scans couldn't penetrate the outer layer of armor, and we should get going, Nerv goons incoming." The AI known as Sid said from within the armor's helmet.

'_Who was that?'_ the girl wondered as she too jetted away.

X

The metal girl soared through the sky over the western United States, the rising sun reflecting off her armor plating.

"It doesn't make any sense," she said aloud to herself, "I should at least be able to get mom on the communicator but she's not answering, and I'm not damaged enough that I shouldn't be able to tap into enhanced GPS…"

Her monologue was interrupted by a sudden feeling of being watched, followed immediately by her sensors screaming at her that somebody had a radar lock on her. "What the…" she got out before a dense stream of high caliber tracers sprayed past her.

Two things about that really bothered her, she decided. The first thing was that the weapons shooting at her were human weapons, so the second thing that bothered her was that humans were shooting at her and they should have known who she was.

She rolled onto her back and flew backwards; looking back the direction the shots came from and was troubled by what she saw; a pair of fixed wing strike fighters, her internal database told her they were F-16C multirole fighters. _'Which haven't been built in fifty years, but those look brand new!'_ she thought to herself as another stream of tracers arced towards her.

Evading them was trivial and she couldn't help but wonder if they were trying to shoot her down or to test her abilities and she didn't intend to stick around to find out. With a thought she pushed her engines to full throttle and went hypersonic in seconds, blasting over Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania in a matter of minutes before she slowed rapidly over New Jersey.

Or at least that was the plan, as she hovered over what was supposed to be Tremorton she found herself staring at nothing but ocean, a double-check of her internal geography database combined with information from the GPS satellites that she _could_ contact confirmed her location, and yet below her was nothing but the atlantic.

"No, this isn't right…" she pleaded to nobody. She ran diagnostic after diagnostic on her systems, trying to find some fault that could account for her inability to find her home, anything to prove she was just off course.

She found nothing that could account for the discrepancy and so with mounting panic she flew straight up into the sky at full burn, clawing towards orbit. Everything about this world seemed wrong, she had to know.

X

Iron Maiden cruised through the skies of Tokyo-3 on her nightly patrol, searching for people in distress whom she would save from their imminent peril. At least that had been the plan; it was a fairly calm night as apparently the recent Angel attack had people staying inside of their houses more than they would have otherwise and so crime was down.

"Not that I'm complaining" Mana said softly to herself, though her armor's AI, Sid, could still hear her.

"Oh, thinking about how quiet it's been tonight?" Sid asked as she processed sensor data and managed flight system cooling with her spare cycles.

"Picked anything up about that girl from last night?" She asked her AI companion as she set down on one of Tokyo-3's taller high-rise structures. She looked around and didn't see anybody up there, which was good; she didn't need somebody sneaking up on her while she was distracted.

"Nothing so fa- hold on, there are reports coming in to NERV, I'm intercepting them… oh wow. Two F-16s tried to shoot down an 'unidentified object' but it went hypersonic before they could hit it, about a half hour later NASA started screaming about an unauthorized space launch over the atlantic…" Sid rattled off as she intercepted the datastreams, "Oh, you're gonna love this part, they think it's us."

"What, like 'us' as in Japan?" Mana asked as she reviewed the data Sid was projecting into her heads up display. _'Huh, she accelerated that fast, I can't even do that!'_

"No, us as in you and I, they think Iron Maiden was who they were shooting at." Sid replied as she continued to sift through the reports.

"Wait, what? How? Why? She's turquoise for crying out loud! and my armor does _not_ have pigtails!" Mana ranted, incensed.

"True, but you're wearing the most advanced power armor on the planet… at least you were before last night." Sid commented as she collected sensor data. "By the way, according to the sensor data I've pulled from NERV's satellite network, she is up in space and if her re-entry course is any indication she's not pleased."

Mana instinctively looked at the sky, even knowing she wouldn't see what she was looking for. "What do you mean? How can you tell?"

"Well, this steep of an entry angle is more likely to kill you than bring you back down; it's not something a sapient with a healthy emotional state would try to pull off… and it looks like she's going to come down over Japan unless something changes." Sid amended as she pulled in more data.

"Sid, bring reactor output levels to 90%, we're going up to greet our new friend." Mana stated after brief consideration, "I don't know who she is or why she's here, but if she means violence I'll repay it in kind." She stepped off the edge of the roof and kicked in her jets, rocketing towards space.

X

The metallic teen flew forcefully back towards the earth below her. The only thing she'd found from orbit was more confusion, the earth below her was not the earth she remembered, Antarctica was _gone_ and the coastal areas of all major continents were largely underwater.

She was scared, confused, not the least she was angry. _'What I would give to turn off my emotions right now…' _she thought to herself. The only thing she had left to her was to find out who ruined her home; who likely killed everyone she'd ever known.

She would pay back their destruction and violence in spades. She'd been given emotion, she'd been giving free will, and she was likely going to go against the very core tenets of her programming, and she simply couldn't make herself care.

She woke up in Japan, she'd start her search for those responsible in Japan, she decided as she rocketed down from orbit. It was not long after that she picked up the metallic signature headed in her direction, she subtly changed course but the signature kept tracking her.

"On an intercept course… metallic… it's got to be cluster!" she snarled with venom she wouldn't have imagined herself capable of. It made sense in her mind only the cluster would have the kind of power to make something like this happen.

Abruptly she fell into cooler air and altered her speed and course to intercept the signature that was closing on her, the cluster would answer for its crimes.

She could see the figure in the distance, the red and gold color scheme was not one she would typically associate with the cluster but the full metal construction cemented in her mind that she was looking at a robot, if the look on its face was any indication, an angry one.

'_That makes two angry robots up here today.' _ She thought with a sense of dark humor. She cut thrust as her foe closed the distance, in moments they were standing a dozen yards from each other, twenty thousand feet above the ground.

"So, you just couldn't give up could you?" she spat. "I said no, I said I didn't want to join the cluster… and you don't even have the courage to attack me directly! No, you kill millions of people and destroy half of my planet! Everybody I've ever known is probably dead, so what you think now that I'm alone I'll come along with you?" she continued with mounting rage.

She tried to deploy her blaster pistols but found that her transformation systems were offline. _'No matter' _she thought _'I still have my palm blasters and my fists, that is all I need!'_

Iron Maiden, secretly Mana Kirishima stared in complete confusion at the girl before her, now seeing her in incredible close-up, had more questions than ever, most of which would have to wait while Sid translated the angry English rant that had just been shouted at her.

"Sid… I don't think that's power armor" she noted as she watched the mouth on the front of the 'helmet' move along with the words. "I do believe that she's some kind of robot or android…" she started before a blast of superheated plasma shot forth from the palm of the turquoise and white robot girl before her.

'_Damn, I wasn't paying attention.'_ She chastised herself mentally as she dodged the shot with a burst of her jets. It was to no avail, within moments a fist caught her on the side of the helmet and she tumbled backwards through the sky, rapid bursts of her hand and foot thrusters countering her tumble and putting her back on her 'feet' in the sky.

For her part the robot did her best to dodge the return pulse blast that the Iron Maiden loosed at her, but she was a good shot and it splashed across her armor, scorching the paint but doing no real damage, to the confusion of both combatants. "Is that really all you've got! I've got to admit it did sting a little but I thought the cluster had more than that!" taunted the metal girl as she charged in, fist ready to deliver the haymaker of the century.

"Sid shields _now!_" Mana screamed as she threw up her arms to block the strike, which slammed into and then abruptly through the now overloaded shields. She grunted in pain as the strike crashed into her armor, the shock causing micro fractures in the plating that were already being repaired.

Sparks shot from her palms as the repulsors shorted out and failed. _'that limits my offensive options…' _Mana thought with great frustration. Her stability compromised, she didn't have the agility to dodge when her foe grabbed her head and shoulders in a robotic bear hug and drove them both towards the ground.

As the robot increased the pressure on Iron Maiden's head and torso Mana's breathing became labored. Panic set in when her HUD began to crack. "Armor integrity is compromised, we've got at most fifteen seconds before the helmet caves in!" warned Sid as the altimeter clicked down below eight thousand feet.

"Argh!" Mana grunted as she struggled in the grip of her foe. She had one chance, slim as it might be. "Sid… divert all power… to the chest…piece…and fire" she forced out through gritted teeth as her helmet started to throw sparks.

In an instant a massive detonation of arc energy separated the two combatants and sent them tumbling apart, each of them only having moments to correct their uncontrolled descent and land before they became part of the terrain.

Iron Maiden struck the ground on her feet with a burst of thruster fire and a loud metallic clank before falling to a knee. She took stock of her situation, her HUD showed that her left gauntlet had completely shattered, though the fact that she could feel the warm afternoon sun on her bare skin could have told her that just as well.

"Sid, I'm offloading you out of the armor, I don't think it's going to hold together much longer. The helmet is about to completely fail and I don't think I can win this fight." She informed her AI companion as she typed commands onto her right forearm with her now bare left hand and had sent her away before she could even protest.

She picked up an inbound sensor contact right as her hud failed completely. _'Figures'_ she thought to herself as she pulled the useless helmet off and threw it to the ground. "I didn't see my last stand being quite like this…" she said to herself as she extended her only remaining functional weapon, the progressive blade embedded in her right forearm armor.

The robotic girl charged in towards her damaged opponent, not to say she was undamaged herself, but she had enough fight left to finish the fight. As she closed the distance she readied her killing blow… and then stopped short.

Her processors refused to believe it, surely her optics were faulty, a momentary diagnostic confirmed that she wasn't hallucinating and she was stunned, her opponent was not a cluster robot as she had initially assumed in her fractured emotional state, her opponent was human, the very thing she was created to protect.

So stunned was she that she didn't react when the charging armored _human_ she'd been fighting tackled her to the ground and prepared a killing blow of her own. Blue eyes met turquoise; a strand of auburn hair fell onto the robot's face.

Mana hesitated, the robot had stopped mid attack; something had changed. Even as pumped and not less than a great deal enraged, she wouldn't just kill somebody, robot or not. She retracted her blade back into her armor and collapsed from exhaustion onto the robot. "Why." She asked softly, "Why attack?"

She couldn't answer, because she didn't know, she was never this reckless before, she never attacked without provocation before… and yet here she was. Laying on busted pavement under a human in some kind of armor that she'd nearly killed.

She sat up, ignoring the tingles of pain coursing over her titanium skin, and picked up the nearly unconscious girl who had stopped just short of delivering a killing blow. "Where do you live? I'll take you home." She asked as the only thing that popped into her head. Maybe this girl had answers, but even if not, she figured she owed her at least that much.

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><p>If it sucked, let me know, i'll stop writing forever.<p>

(just kidding)

[but no, really.]


	3. Taking Stock

"What the hell happened here?" Misato asked as she surveyed the battered and broken landscape, an overturned car bent in half against a storefront at one end of the street, a crater on the other. She couldn't believe the scale of destruction she was looking at, let alone that nobody had died.

Ritsuko took a deep drag from her cigarette and flicked the butt to the ground. "Two of our resident 'vigilantes' went toe to toe, Iron Maiden and the one that showed up after the fifth, the few witnesses said this is where former made her last stand" she said, gesturing to the multitude of armor fragments littering a five meter stretch going from the impact crater towards the destroyed car.

"So…" Misato started, mildly disturbed by the question she knew she must ask, "Where's the body?" She turned around a few times, visually scanning the immediate area, finding neither hide nor hair of either combatant.

"That's where it gets weird" she replied, lighting another cigarette. Today was going to be three pack day, she just knew it. "The new vigilante, who we've established is most likely female, had a clear victory in her grasp, but we don't have any more information on _why_ the fight ended, only that the two left together."

Misato bent down and picked up the discarded helmet of Iron Maiden and stared into the faceplate, "what were you two doing…" she asked the assembly of metal and circuits, possibilities rolling around in her brain.

Ritsuko leaned close to Misato and spoke in a hushed tone, "Privately and off the record, I think Iron Maiden was trying to protect the civilian population, she could have run away but didn't."

"That's the impression I've always got from her, it's not like she's ever done anything explicitly wrong…" Misato trailed off.

"But she's a threat to NERV's status as sole defense against the Angels," Ritsuko finished, taking another deep drag from her cigarette, "and Ikari can't tolerate that."

"What about this new girl?" Misato asked, still looking at the damaged helmet in her hands.

Ritsuko chuckled darkly and discarded her spent cigarette and lit a fresh one, "Well… that's why I've been chain-smoking today; she terrifies me, Misato. Whoever she is, she had the power to take out Iron Maiden in a fair fight, and if she decides she doesn't like us we don't have a hope in hell."

Misato's eyes widened as the implications struck her. Her thoughts turned to what she held in her hand. "Rits… maybe we're not so helpless."

X

"Hold it right there" the man yelled, the rifle in his hands emphasizing the force behind his words as the robotic girl came through the door into his home, "I know you're made of some pretty sturdy stuff but I'm willing to bet that you won't enjoy getting shot in the eye at this range, so why don't you start explaining why you're carrying my daughter and just who and what you are."

The metallic girl hesitated, her mouth working up and down for a moment before anything came to mind. "You can shoot at me later if you want but right now she's hurt and it's my fault, help her!" she pleaded while pushing closer, her joints hitched at random points, the damaged state of her body become more evident to the man as she moved.

And it was then that he noticed how banged up Mana looked, he put down the rifle and rushed over to help the robot carry his daughter to the kitchen table. "Don't think you're off the hook yet, you still owe me an explanation when this is done" he stated as he started prying the remaining armor pieces off of Mana.

"No, you're definitely not off the hook" a disembodied voice issued forth from a speaker grille in the wall, "you're the cause of this, I just can't figure why you went that far and flinched."

Metallic eyes scanned the wall while the robot's arms moved of their own accord assisting the removal of the armor plating. She locked eyes on the speaker grille. "You're an AI, you were in that suit weren't you?" she asked, "I didn't realize… that I was fighting a human being, I hesitated at the last second and left myself wide open to her hail mary… but she stopped, I need to know why she stopped."

"Well, you did a good job of not killing anybody anyway," the man spoke up finally, "Mana's banged up, exhausted, she'll be sore a**s **hell in the morning, but she'll live."

He hesitated for a moment and looked over the robotic girl; she looked, for lack of a better word, exhausted. "For what it's worth, I can tell you why she stopped" he started.

She fidgeted, the man couldn't tell if it was a malfunction, damage, or if she was advanced enough that it was a nervous tick, though all evidence seemed more and more to point to the latter. "Why is that?" she asked, finally.

"Because she's a good person, I can't speak for her state of mind but she's not the type to shoot first nor the type to go farther than is necessary, the latter is a trait that it seems you two share… and on that note, just what are you, exactly?" he asked while lifting his now much lighter daughter into his arms.

"I think… that you probably figured that out already." The metal girl said, cautiously as she followed the man towards the living room.

"I think that if I cracked open that metal shell I wouldn't find a person inside; you shouldn't exist, you can't exist. Even Sid was an accident, a ghost in the machine. It was pure random chance that she ever developed sentience at all, but you… you were planned; you're more than Sid is… I would almost say you were human, so tell me, how can that be?" the man asked as he set his daughter down on the sofa and covered her with a blanket.

"I… I guess that's close, I'm a robot, or… what you'd call one anyway I suppose, I'm Glo…" she started, then trailed off, she'd never liked her official designation and this was the perfect excuse to stop using it, "You can call me Jenny, Jenny Wakeman."

The man blinked, surprised, "So, you have an actual name, interesting. I'm Doctor Hiro Kirishima, You've… met my daughter, Mana. The disembodied voice you've been hearing is the AI, Sid. I wish I could say it's a pleasure to meet you Jenny, but… all things considered, we've all probably had better days."

Jenny stared at her feet nervously, "Yeah, you could say that." Her mind was racing, an accomplishment considering her immense processing power. She kept replaying the fight in her head, wondering how it could have gone differently, if she'd actually killed the girl…

"Well, let's try to get started on the right foot then, I'm trusting that you had no malicious intent, and you look damaged, so let's see if there's anything I can do to help you out." The doctor offered.

Jenny smiled for the first time that day, "Thank you."


End file.
